One of my favorite parts of doing design work at The Shakerite is our magazine-style cover, which is made possible by our tabloid-size page. Instead of a more traditional newspaper page-one design with the photos and body text of multiple stories, we pick one story to emphasize with full-page art.
This design choice isn’t unheard of in traditional newspapers — The Plain Dealer, for example, famously ran a full-page cutout of LeBron James with the headline “Gone.” following his decision to leave the Cleveland Cavaliers for the Miami Heat July 9, 2010, and one for his return to Cleveland with the headline “Home” July 12, 2014 — but it’s used sparingly. The Shakerite’s consistent use of full-page covers grants us a level of creativity and artistic freedom typically reserved for magazines.
But the process for creating these covers is rarely straightforward. Over the past two school years, The Shakerite has run 10 of these covers, each with their own drafts and alternatives that were cut before going to print.
Here are some of my favorite scrapped covers (in various states of incompleteness and disarray), next to those that made the final cut:
Nov. 20, 2024: Instead of the editorially contentious “FEAR” cover, we nearly ran this subtler “White House” design. In place of the standard American flag atop the building, we flew the Trump “Rambo” flag that gained infamy after insurrectionist Ryan Samsel waved the flag as he stormed the Capitol Jan. 6, 2021. He was later convicted of assaulting Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards.
March 21, 2025: It’s hard to make a compelling, full-page design for a story about somewhat immaterial “AI.” Former ’Rite Artist Dylan Smith’s cartoon was by far the better choice.
May 27, 2025: Before the final “stamp” design was created, the headline “DEI!” ran as a furious scrawl. Thank goodness we didn’t subject readers to my atrocious handwriting.
